Sex & Love

My Big Ol’ Jewish Wedding: Hey Mr. DJ (Play Some Shlomo Carlebach)

Do we establish an appreciation for our cultural heritage and pick a traditional Jewish song that might not have any meaning to us, or do we pour over our MP3 collections looking for the perfect Otis Redding tune? Read More

I’ve worked in the music industry in one way or another since I was about fifteen. I’m thirty now, so if you are as good at rudimentary math as I am, you realize that half of my life has been spent going to concerts (but calling them “shows”), spending far too much money on vinyl LPs, and covering up the fact that I have zero actual music ability by writing about records I like.

This is important, because if you’ve ever seen the film version of High Fidelity, you might remember the main character discussing how a significant others taste in things like books, music, movies, etc. does really matter. Fortunately for me, my soon-to-be wife has impeccable taste in both books and music — but film is a whole other story.

Now I’m unsure if I mentioned this in the last post, but we are trying to make this as traditional of a Jewish wedding as possible, and being fans of (mostly) secular music might present a bit of a problem. We could go the somewhat popular route and hire a bunch of Hasids to bump some Lady Gaga, but since we don’t really like Gaga, that probably won’t do.

The issue is that we know there has to be some traditional Jewish wedding music, and we’re totally okay with that. Have you heard Shlomo Carlebach doing “Od Yishama”? It’s easily one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard.

If you can find me a team of musicians to rock that, I’m totally down. If they can also kill on “Hava Nagila,” that’s a huge bonus. Beyond that, I’m not really sure there are many more Jewish wedding songs that I know, and since music is so important to the both of us, I’m left to wonder what do we do?

When we have kids, they will grow up with the same rabid music fanaticism (i.e., nerds) as their parents, and they are going to ask “What was mommy and daddy’s first dance to?” Do we use that moment to establish an appreciation for our cultural heritage by picking a traditional Jewish song that might not have any meaning to us, or do we pour over our MP3 collections looking for the perfect Otis Redding tune? (Or maybe we can scrounge up a million bucks to get Kanye to play?)